The Georgetown University Art Galleries are closed for the summer. We look forward to welcoming you back for our fall exhibitions in September.
Opening Reception: Fall 2025 Exhibitions. Join us on Friday, September 19th from 6:00 - 8:00 pm to celebrate McArthur Binion: Notes on Form (Intimate Structures) and Lorraine O’Grady: Miscegenated Family Album. Enjoy light refreshments and live music. Attendance is free, but space is limited. RSVP Here.
Hung Liu: Happy and Gay Opens in Philadelphia
Our traveling exhibition Hung Liu: Happy and Gay opens at the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania this month. The exhibition begins its national tour, sharing Liu’s poignant, richly painted meditations on childhood, propaganda, and identity with new audiences.
Learn more →
ANNOUNCEMENTS
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS
MCARTHUR BINION
NOTES ON FORM (INTIMATE STRUCTURES)
On View September 19 - December 7, 2025Maria and Alberto de la Cruz GalleryNotes on Form (Intimate Structures) explores McArthur Binion’s work from 2009 to the present, highlighting his ongoing use of form, shape, and a deeply personal language of abstraction. Born in 1946 in Mississippi and raised as one of eleven children, Binion’s early life continues to inform the material and conceptual foundation of his practice.
Referring to each work as a self-portrait, he layers oil stick and ink in hatched lines of a grid, a signature characteristic of Binion’s oeuvre, on top of a collage of personal documents such as birth certificates, photographs, address book pages, and images of his childhood home. Each canvas becomes an extension of the “under conscious,” a term he uses to articulate the deeply embedded personal histories that materialize in his work.
While Binion’s compositions gesture towards the minimalist style of a grid, they resist the impersonal aesthetic often associated with this style in art history. The exhibition title nods toward Primary Structures, the Jewish Museum’s influential 1966 exhibition that introduced minimalist sculpture as a formal movement grounded in order and control. Binion’s “intimate structures,” by contrast, speak through touch, rhythm, presence.
This exhibition situates Binion’s work within Washington, D.C.—a city shaped by histories of Black abstraction, from Alma Thomas to Sam Gilliam, where abstraction has long served as a space of both personal expression and political agency. Binion’s shaped canvases enter that conversation with a distinct voice. The use of repetition, fragments, and layers echo both his lifelong stutter and his background in writing; often referring to himself as a “writer who paints.” Through this lens, Binion reimagines minimalism and abstraction as something lived, remembered, and felt.
The exhibition is generously supported by Maria & Alberto de la Cruz.
Header Image: McArthur Binion, Under:Ground, 2025. Graphite, ink, paint stick, and paper on board, 40 × 48 × 2 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Below: McArthur Binion, stelluca: i (rural geometry), 2011. Oil paint stick, ink, wax crayon, and paper on board, 48 x 64 x 2 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul, and London.
LORRAINE O’GRADY
Miscegenated Family Album
On View September 19 - December 7, 2025Lucille M. & Richard F.X. Spagnuolo Art GalleryIn Miscegenated Family Album (1994) pioneering conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady invites us into a deeply personal and historical dialogue. Through a photo-installation of diptychs, she juxtaposes photographs of ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti with images of her older sister, Devonia Evangeline O’Grady Allen, and members of their respective families.
The diptychs that belong to this series were selected from a 1980 performance by O’Grady in which 65 image pairs of Nefertiti and Devonia Evangeline were projected behind the artist’s live action. These works draw striking parallels between the two women—their husbands and children, mixed-race backgrounds, and the estranged relationships with their sisters.
The word miscegenation evokes the history of laws that once prohibited against marriage between people of different races. In the United States, these laws were declared unconstitutional in 1967. O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album probes these tensions in order to suggest the ambiguity and complications of belonging, situating O’Grady’s family in a wider history of racial and gendered relations.
At the same time, the installation represents O’Grady’s process of mourning for her estranged sister, who had died before the two could reconcile. In many ways, this body of work serves as an elegy, reflecting on loss and the endurance of memory, both personal and collective. In the intimacy of these portraits, we become witnesses to a poignant autobiographical narrative playing out over time.
The exhibition is generously supported by Lucille M. & Richard F.X. Spagnuolo. Guest curated by Donna Honarpisheh, Associate Curator at ICA Miami.
Lorraine O’Grady, Sisters IV, 1980/94. Cibachrome print, 28 x 39 inches.
L: Devonia’s sister, Lorraine
R: Nefertiti’s sister, Mutnedjmet
Courtesy of the Lorraine O’Grady Trust and Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City) ©️ 2025 Lorraine O’Grady/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.